Rebellion to licence 2000 AD comic to external developers

Sniper Elite 4 developer Rebellion has announced plans to licence its 2000 AD IP to external developers. CEO Jason Kingsley broke the news over the weekend at the 40 Years of Thrill-power Festival in London, which marked four decades of the weekly anthology comic book.

"This week we’re proud to be launching the latest game in our highly successful stealth shooter series, Sniper Elite 4. But the success of this and games like Zombie Army Trilogy means that our production slate for the next few years is very full," Kingsley said in a statement to MCV.

This means we just don’t have the capacity to do the one thing we’ve always wanted to do more of, which is make games based on our 2000 AD characters. So I’m pleased to announce that we are opening up 2000 AD’s incredible library of characters to other game developers for licensing purposes."

Kingsley adds that while Rebellion’s been regularly approached by film and TV studios to use the 2000 AD characters, game developers seem to have been more reluctant to get in touch.

Game developers often seem reticent," he says. "They maybe see Rebellion as a competitor and so think that we wouldn’t be interested in working with other companies.

We want to avoid the mistakes other publishers have made where fans have been bombarded with lots of low quality products, so we’re only looking to work with people who value these characters and the standards they deserve as much as we do. 2000 AD is the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, we’d like to work with other developers to produce the galaxy’s greatest games.”

Rebellion has previously made three titles based on the 2000 AD comics. The first came in 2003, Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death, which was then followed by Rogue Trooper in 2006. Then, in 2013, Rebellion took the series mobile with Judge Dredd vs Zombies.